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PagedAttention

Follow a token position through a block table, watch a cache grow, and trace a shared tail through copy-on-write. Separate memory saved from throughput gained.

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RELATED CONCEPTS

The KV Cache Continuous Batching Prefix Caching and KV Reuse Chunked Prefill GPU Memory Hierarchy KV Cache Sizing

LESSONS THAT TEACH THIS

Inference EngineeringFollow two requests through one loaded model21 min→Foundations of AI InfrastructureTurn retained context into a cache capacity limit14 min→Foundations of AI InfrastructureDefine when requests join, leave and wait13 min→

PRACTICE THIS IN REAL QUESTIONS

LLM Inference & ServingHow does PagedAttention work, and what problem was it solving?→CUDA, Triton & Kernel EngineeringImplement the verification step of speculative decoding, including the rollback of the KV cache after a rejection.→CUDA, Triton & Kernel EngineeringSketch a paged attention kernel. What changes from FlashAttention once the KV cache is not contiguous?→Open-Weights Models & Serving EnginesSet max-model-len and max-num-seqs for a chat product from first principles.→Open-Weights Models & Serving EnginesvLLM crashes with out of memory during startup on a model that should fit. Debug it.→Open-Weights Models & Serving EnginesIs speculative decoding worth enabling on a trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts model?→